20.6.08

By arresting people for marijuana possession and forcing them into treatment, the government shows why it has to arrest people for marijuana possession. That's our self-justifying drug policy in a nutshell.

In 2000, psychiatrist Peter Breggin testified before Congress that, "Teachers, school psychologists, and administrators commonly make dire threats about their inability to teach children without medicating them." This trend is certainly worrying, not least because the long-term effects of regularly administered stimulants are as yet little understood. -- So there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about child doping, particularly given the growing frequency of ADD diagnoses. But what about the strategic use of the same drugs by consenting adults, particularly college students? As usual, the law gets it backwards: While it is perfectly legal to feed—even force feed—Ritalin to a child, unsupervised use by knowledgeable grownups is a crime.

The new technologies will be dangerous as well as liberating. But in the long run, social constraints must bend to new realities. Humanity cannot live forever with clipped wings.- Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds